The newest UN report is out -- and the news is pretty good

There’s always plenty of bad news to worry about. All you have to do is read the front page of your local paper or listen to a few excruciating minutes of the daily digest of disaster we call television news to fall into a sort of black funk about the fate of the world.

So keep this in mind:  Life is  getting dramatically better for a lot of people.

Check out this new report from the UN, which concludes that “The past 20 years have seen substantial progress in many aspects of human development. Most people today are healthier, live longer, are more educated and have more access to goods and services. Even in countries facing adverse economic conditions, people’s health and education have greatly improved. And there has been progress not only in improving health and education and raising income, but also in expanding people’s power to select leaders, influence public decisions and share knowledge.”

Of course it’s not all good news. There remain the underlying giant issues of climate change, pollution, income inequality, hunger, and on and on and on.  I would never argue that the world is in great shape, or that humans are perfect, or that there aren’t great problems to solve.

On the other hand, it’s easy to overdo the pessimism.  I know many people who — fed on a daily diet of cringe-inducing news — fall into a sort of despair for the human race, who come to believe that humans are dooming themselves.

We are not. Millions of us are, slowly and haltingly, working to make the world better. And much of the good we try to do is working.

Great challenges lie ahead of us. I hope we face them with determination, brains, common sense and — yes, I’ll say it — optimism.

[Thanks to Andy Revkin of DotEarth for pointing toward this rare piece of positive news]

OK: It’s 1921, World War I has just ended, and people are still hungry all over Europe. What do you do? Use biplanes to round up caribou herds and machine-gun them, of course!  This is just one of several historical hunger-fighting ideas from the archives of Popular Science.

I’ve been doing so much driving recently that I’ve developed a love of audiobooks. Just heard today that my latest — The Alchemy of Air — is now available on audio here. This is good news for the farmers who’ve been asking me for something to listen to in their tractor cabs (seriously, if you were going to spend all day driving a combine, wouldn’t you want to listen to a good book?).

I’m posting the text of a speech I gave recently at OHSU, “Genius or Crackpot: Linus Pauling’s Medical Odyssey.”  It covers Pauling’s initial work with Vitamin C, with a good bit of context from his earlier career. Genius or crank? You decide.

This editorial by the Portland Oregonian newspaper, which somehow relates advice on water’s role in weight loss to one of my earlier books, on drug development.  Plus they manage to link a current interest — global food and water issues — to one of my older ones.  Synchronicity, or . . . OK, then, just coincidence.

I shared dinner recently with a group including a smartly dressed soon-to-be law student. The conversation turned, as if often seems to do at dinner parties these days,  to the merits of organic food. She started complaining about some of her school friends. They were so much into the whole/ organic/local food thing that she thought they were sort of snobby about it. She didn’t like the way they acted superior about their diets and one-upped each other about their food purity and turned up their noses when she ordered beef. She was sick of what she called their “holier-than-thou attitudes.”

Then she talked about the place where they shopped, one of those gorgeous Wild Oats kind of stores where everything seems to be GMO-free and organic and  artfully presented and costs a lot. The store is in a trendy urban area. The parking lot is full of expensive cars.  “An elitist grocery experience,” she said.

“That’s what’s so frustrating about having conversations with people who are into organic: It’s not about the food,” she concluded. “It’s about separating yourself. It’s a class issue.”

Interesting. I certainly fall into the demographic she was complaining about. I try to eat healthy, and have talked quite a bit about the pros and cons of locavorism, polyculture, cage-free eggs and grass-fed animals. It is true that organic is now upscale and you don’t find a Wild Oats in poor parts of town (in poor parts of town, you find McDonalds), and the gorgeous local produce at our weekend farmers market costs about as much as steak.  I can see why some people, especially those without a lot of money, might look at organic as overpriced veggies hawked to overpriviliged people.

On the other hand, I know a lot of people with limited means who really believe that you are what you eat, and who choose to spend a larger chunk of what income they have on food that is both healthier for them and grown in ways that are better for the planet.

Point is this: We face serious food problems in the world. A billion people go to bed hungry every night. We don’t need to waste our energy turning food into more of a class issue than it already is. It is a shame that organic food and other fresher, healthier alternatives are too expensive for a lot of poor people.

What we need to do, I think, is stop worrying about labels and dietary dogma, and start working toward food parity: that is to say, equal access to healthy food for everyone.  That’s a huge order, and will involve complex efforts directed toward finding better ways to grow, distribute, and provide nutrient-rich food (not empty calories) to rich and poor alike.

Good food can not and should not be restricted to the elite.

A beautiful photo collection of people reading around the world.

OK — while debate continues over just how fast the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill is dispersing, some thoughts on perspective.

Compare the Deepwater spill to these figures, based on a number of sources and used in an exhibit by the Smithsonian.

Deepwater is estimated to have released somewhere around 210 million gallons into the ocean.

Check that number against those in the link? That’s right.  Every year,  we dump more than 360 million gallons of oil into the ocean from our storm drains — most of it from road runoff and oil changes. And that’s a 15-year-old estimate, so the figure is probably higher now.  Let me know if you find newer information.

Add that to the 137 million gallons released into the ocean from routine maintenance — bilge cleaning of ships and so forth — and you come up with this:

Every twenty weeks, we spew a Deepwater Horizon’s worth of oil into the world’s oceans  — without giving it a thought.

But, as Dr. Tittle points out in the comments, crude is not the same as processed oil, and Deepwater Horizon was a single source event affecting a single marine area, while the other numbers are global, spreading around the pollution.

Like this excellent post says: It’s time to get beyond debates about  “organic” vs “conventional” and move toward developing an agriculture that is better than either: highly productive while at the same time highly sustainable, good for our health and good for the planet, wisely using resources while getting food equitably to poor and rich.  This is a reachable goal, but not if we get mired down in debating categories.  I like a lot of things about organic farming, but it’s not a cure-all. GMO is not a cure-all. Local farming is not a cure-all. Industrial agriculture is not a cure-all. We need to use the best of each.

Genetically modified canola spreads in Midwest.